>>3975910Olivier: I have heard women say Terry’s work is just an expression of the typical male obsession for sex and a celebration of the camera as an extension of his phallus, but this is a very reductive definition of his work.
First, his pictures are a form of visual humor. Second, he is always sharing real emotion with his model. They are not objects or sexual props. The photos aren’t even about that. They are an experiment, an examination of the interaction between a photographer and his models in this age of media, fashion, self-obsession and narcissistic paranoia. He keeps pushing these dialectic structures (man/woman, photographer/model,
phallic/non-phallic) as far as he can until the difference between “art” and “fashion” becomes totally blurred.
You don’t know what is real and what is constructed. When the critics make it a competition and become obsessed with choosing the winner (the photographer or the model) they make it so ideological it becomes uninteresting. Terry’s experimentation is about subverting this dual structure and documenting an intimate relationship with the model. Where can he take it? Where can he take it today? What are the limits of the game? What will the viewers call fashion and what will they call art? Will they reject the images entirely and censor him? That is the experiment.
Gavin: It’s also reductive to assume it’s all about shock value. I remember when the Sex Pistols were on Bill Grundy (host of Thames Today, a London television show of the 1970s) and he accused them of swearing just to shock people. They pointed out that this is the way they talk every day. There’s no premeditation about it. They were just being honest.
